Equilibrium
by ongreenergrasses
Summary: When you lose what you live through, what is left behind? ON HIATUS INDEFINITELY.
1. Chapter 1

**Um. Hi.  
>NO idea where this will go. For now, a one-shot. But make no mistake, this intrigues me. It's got potential for a multi-chapter. (Your thoughts, ladies?) However, I'm doing Scriptfrenzy and as such cannot make any promises.<br>This is dedicated to my dear, dear friend columbine-and-asphodel. She's had a long illness, and recently she had a scare that it had taken a turn for the worse. I was, quite frankly, terrified, and went in my room and just wrote in a fit of passion. Luckily, she's okay. But this is her thank you note, because it's always better to tell people in the moment. Without her, I wouldn't be here.  
>Written to "The Broken Ones" by Dia Frampton<br>Disclaimer: I own – cockiness and Celtx. Both are useful. Both are not Sherlock.  
>Warnings: The high rating is for a reason. True, it's not that bad for your ordinary citizen. But to a musician such as myself? This is the scene from your nightmares.<strong>

His hands were the first to go.

A musician's hands are subjected to wear and tear that a normal pair of hands, no matter the amount of hard labor they do, cannot even dream of. The musician's fingers are covered in calluses, horrible white pockets of murdered skin that peel and flake and leave ragged edges around the fingertips. Their ligaments become stretched and torn, their wrists strained and tightened. Every form of art requires an unnatural contortion of some part of the body, but playing a stringed instrument is the very worst because it ruins your hands.

Sherlock played the violin in the way that some people might sit down with a cup of tea in their bedroom after a long day. It helped him label things, sift through piles of data. It helped him to settle. Once he'd begun playing regularly, he could hardly remember his life without that violin. It was a piece of him, one of many that had been missing and one of only a few that had been found. The violin was the replacement for drugs and cigarettes, a far less destructive manner of slowing down the brain's activity. It was a way to vent, to find peace inside.

He picked up the violin one day and everything sounded wrong. He couldn't reach a high A, his vibrato was tight and frazzled, the bow sat wrong in his hand. This day had been a long time coming – after all, there had been the feeling of tightness and looseness, all at the same time, in the joints of his fingers and the bones of his wrists. It had plagued him for weeks now; it was something his mind had tried to block out because he could not bear to accept the truth. It was a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel and repetitive strain injury and anything that can ever hurt a hand that has worked too hard.

Sherlock always knew that day would come but that didn't mean he was ready for it.

The world shuddered and stopped. He felt an eerie sense of calm as he took the violin out from under his chin and looked it up and down, retuned it, checked the angle of the bridge, even tilted it to catch the light from the window and examined the soundpost. It had to be a flaw in the violin, it had to, because he had never had a problem like this before.

Then he tucked it back under his chin, tightened the bow, and quickly ran through some scales.

They didn't sound right but he ignored that, because it wasn't that off, now, was it, and maybe he was just having a bad day, maybe he wasn't warmed up yet, maybe his calluses had finally all peeled off and his fingers were unable to get traction against the strings, maybe the bridge had shifted a bit and set all the strings out of position. Every single possibility that he could think of (and there were at least 26) ran through his head in a loop until he finished the diminished seventh arpeggio and started in on the first piece that came to mind.

It was John's favorite. A chaconne written in baroque times but with elements that seemed purely romantic; keys running from G all the way to B flat and D sharp minor; a hybrid sort of piece, if you like. Originally John had refused to listen to anything but Mendelssohn, but after living with Sherlock for all those years he had become exposed to thousands of different works by different composers from different time periods, and out of all of that his very favorite had been Vitali.

Sherlock has never really known love. He still doesn't, if we get storybook and rom-com particular. But he wanted to make John happy, and he loved to see his smile, and if getting that smile meant playing one of the more complex pieces in his repetoire, then so be it. He was going to play that chaconne, goddammit, and of course since Sherlock is a stubborn man, he did.

And everything was wrong.

We must remember that this is Sherlock Holmes we speak of. The piece still sounded perfectly fine. Obviously, the man could tear the most horrendous sounds out of that poor instrument, but he also had the ability to make it sing so sweetly that you wouldn't even notice the tears running down your face until he raised an eyebrow and remarked while running octaves in the middle of a cadenza, "Sentiment". As he played, there were no major flaws in intonation, or rhythm, or musicality. It was still good to a trained ear, and to the untrained ear it was majestic, but it all felt wrong to Sherlock. His hands were not responding properly and when he tried to reach for the harmonics it felt like someone had grabbed his wrist with red-hot fingers and twisted it all the way around. He felt clumsy and inept and that was not a feeling he was used to. Or liked. He played a few lines, but everything worsened and then he got to the sixteenth note passage full of slurs that flew across strings and he knew he couldn't go on.

There came then an overwhelming sense of panic, choking him, threatening to engulf him, and he gently laid the violin and bow back down on the sofa and then picked up an empty mug from the coffee table and threw it against the wall as hard as he could. In all the world there are only two things more terrifying than an artist who can no longer do their chosen work, and one of them is a distraught mother and the other is a Republican.

But throwing the mug was not enough, could not express how useless and crippled and censored he felt, and before he really knew what he was doing, he had reached over and snapped the bow in two. Now there was a technical flaw, a reason for the violin's silence that was beyond his control, and a small twisted part inside of him felt a little better but mostly he just felt worse.

John must have heard the mug crash against the wall, and he had to have heard Sherlock's attempts at playing, but it didn't matter why he came downstairs because all that mattered was that he was there, and he grabbed Sherlock's wrists and pulled him away from the fragments of bow and the abandoned violin and upstairs into their bedroom. And then the realization of what had happened, what he had done, finally hit Sherlock harder than any blow any human could ever deliver and he fell down on his knees in front of John, who was now seated on the bed, and laid his head in John's lap and cried.

Sherlock Holmes does not cry. He has really, properly, consciously cried only three times since he turned sixteen (and two of those times were not his fault, for the record) and he hated every second he spent crying. It seemed so useless and pointless and it achieved an incredible amount of nothing and he felt so wrung out afterwards that he vowed each time he would never do it again. But, of course, vows like that are meant to be broken.

That day he cried so hard for so many reasons. He was angry and scared and he didn't know what he would do, indeed, what was left for him, and then he became hysterical and his mind began dreaming up wild, embarrassing possibilities that he deleted as soon as they were born because they were so irrational and so reminiscent of a teenage girl 'angsting'; before those possibilities were deleted, they tore him to shreds. But all those little emotions and fears combined into one reason. He cried because he felt hopeless, trapped inside that body. He cried because he did not know how he would be able to speak, to express himself any more. His only porthole outwards had just been lost.

John let him cry. He gently stroked the wild curls and rubbed the trembling shoulders and just let him cry. He sensed that this was what Sherlock needed, because although the detective liked to play God and the devil, he was just another human. John was the only one who was allowed to see this side of Sherlock, the vulnerable side, and that terrified him. He had been given this brilliant, beautiful mind to look after and he had no idea if he was doing a good job or not. It was an instrument of spun glass, so very fragile, and John had to be there to catch it if it fell.

The world got larger and larger and Sherlock felt smaller and smaller and more and more got packed inside him and then he couldn't breathe. He had felt like this before and he knew how it ended. There was nothing he could do to stop himself from spiraling out and over the edge. And it hurt.

Hours, days, years, any length of time could have passed. Sherlock couldn't remember. He knew for sure that he had lost control, and deep inside a voice told him he had been screaming. But his body and his traitorous mind were finally exhausted and he completely collapsed, fell asleep kneeling there on the floor with his fingers gripping John's thighs and tears on his cheeks and the only sensation in the world John's fingers in his hair.

_By the way, if the few classical music hints scattered throughout the fic just made you squint harder – the piece Sherlock tried to play is the Chaconne in G Minor by Vitali. As a cellist, this is the only violin piece I will voluntarily listen to. I adore it. No idea bout John, but I think he might, too. _


	2. Chapter 2

**I wrote this far too late at night. When I was supposed to be working on a script, well, actually supposed to be sleeping, but still. I've decided to continue this fic. But no guarantees. I might throw a tantrum and remove all chapters except for the first in the end if I'm not happy with the overall quality. I also don't know how many readers I'm going to have due to the touchy nature of this topic, but I'm hoping a couple of you will stick around :)  
>Written to "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star.<br>Disclaimer: I'm just playing with 'em. Not very nicely, I'll admit.  
>Warnings: This fic is living up to its M. I can't say exactly WHY because that would spoil the chapter. But it's M. Very, very M. If anything in the first chapter may have triggered you, or you thought it might in the future, please do not read this. <strong>

It is an interesting phenomenon, the way life always keeps going. After the worst of things, when life is darkest and you think that you simply just cannot go any longer, life just keeps swirling and tumbling around the little glass ball you are enclosed in. You're surrounded by the world but you're closed off from it. You love it because it feels almost normal, but hate it because you don't want to feel normal any more because things AREN'T normal. They really aren't. And you need someone to recognize that, to say that I understand that things aren't working in your life and I don't know quite what's wrong but I'll try to help you anyway – but instead you're stuck in this little glass bubble and cannot get out.

Sherlock had never felt so trapped like he did when he couldn't play that goddamn violin. John took him to another doctor, just to confirm the diagnosis, and yes, it was advanced carpal tunnel that only time and luck (and excessive amounts of surgery that Sherlock was not interested in) could hope to heal. John looked over worriedly at Sherlock when the little woman in the white coat said this, but Sherlock just coughed and said matter-of-factly, "Really, how are you earning enough money to sustain a family of six back in the French Basque territory?"

It was all so irritatingly normal. Normal for Sherlock, and normal for John, and normal for Baker Street life. It was just one of them getting into an accident, again, except for this time it wasn't normal. And it wasn't right. And it was not going to be okay.

The violin had helped when John couldn't. If Sherlock was frustrated with a case, he ran the entirety of the Scottish Fantasy and then moved onto Paganini. After an insult directed towards his brother hit home, Schubert and Sibelius in turn filled the flat. When there was the rare fight with John, he attacked Bartok with a vengeance. Waiting for somebody or something to arrive and distract him? Bach partitas. The violin and its music was just one of those little details of life that came for granted until it didn't.

The things it had been keeping him from were much more self-destructive, make no mistake. Sherlock had done it all to try and distract himself, and some of the available options had worked much better than others. Paradoxically, it seemed the more harmful the long term outcome, the better the short term solution.

So few people knew things about him, true things, all the bits that he had taught himself to hide. Not even John knew everything. Sherlock had wanted to tell him, sometimes, and then he had looked again at the man standing next to him, that laughing, brilliant, beautiful man, all full of light and happiness and good, and he couldn't. They were opposites in almost every way imaginable and sometimes Sherlock didn't like it, but when it came to pasts and futures and the things that we try and hide, rape and self injury and death and drugs and child abuse, Sherlock loved that they were different. He never wanted John to have to carry that kind of darkness and pain within him; he wanted John's worldview to stay as glossy as it could be, never becoming shadowed and tattered like Sherlock's.

John was not the only one who had seen the scars, but he was the only one who had really, properly, understood them. He knew why they were there, every single one of the hundreds of scars the detective kept hidden under shirt sleeves and trouser legs. When he had asked for the first time all those months ago, Sherlock had just shrugged a little bit to say _I'm past that. I'm better. You make me better._ Which was true, but at the same time Sherlock wasn't a character out of a book or a movie. He was a man, a living, breathing human, however much he might hate it, and he had feelings and needed vices that kept aforementioned feelings in check.

Now, Sherlock could not play that violin, physically could not, and every single door that John and the musical vice had locked reopened. The poor Guarneri took up a resting place on the bookcase. There dust settled down on it, the strings slipped, the bridge began to bend. It took only a few months before the spark went out of it and it became just a wooden box again. Sherlock did not touch it. Even after he thought his 'condition' (John's word, not his) had improved, he didn't dare pick it up. He may have been able to play, but he just as well might not have, and he didn't think he would be able to stand it if he had picked it up and then not been able to do so much as an A major scale.

Time passed, flew around and around the outside of the little glass bubble while Sherlock stagnated inside, never quite able to reach the outside world. For a while, it seemed to everyone that he would be okay. That he could cope with this loss. Sherlock at first thought they might be right, and then he realized that they were all just morons.

He wasn't okay.

Not okay means many things. Not okay is different for every person. Not okay means dead inside. Or alive and screaming. Sherlock was both, and neither, and somewhere three quarters in between.

He began pulling things out from his book of tricks again just to gain a reprieve from the pressure mounting inside his skull. Nothing was too much, too radical. But there was nothing, no solution, that took the place of the violin. With his music he could say everything and with this? Only the horrible things, the twisted, dark, wretched things, could escape. There was just not a big enough pathway for everything to flow out of him any more. That was what the violin had been, a way to vent, and although such a thing is exploitation of an art, Sherlock did not give a flying rocketeer's fuck. It had felt good.

Then again, he almost welcomed back some of those old ways of keeping himself sane on the bad days. In a twisted way, he felt like a piece of art with all those lines and swirls running across his body. He had forgotten the satisfaction some of those things brought him, a dark kind of glee that he couldn't suppress. He manipulated this faux happiness, used it to trick almost everyone who saw him.

John was so worried. He really was. He, unlike everyone else, could see the change in Sherlock and it frightened him. He had never seen the man like this before, and he did the best he could but he felt like it wasn't enough. Really, there was nothing John could have done. Sherlock had broken inside and all the King's horses and all the King's men could never have put the detective together again. John didn't know to what extent things had gone wrong because Sherlock was careful, oh, so very careful. When John nearly found his stash in the bedroom, Sherlock dropped the laptop; when John's wandering hands came too close to recently opened scars, Sherlock dropped to his knees. It was standard procedure. Nothing too unusual, really. Not for Sherlock.

But the hiding was taking its toll on the detective. He had become used to being – open around John. John had seen any hint of emotion he dared betray. John was his confidant, his protector, just because John would never laugh at him, shun him, call him a freak. Underneath all that ice and bluster, Sherlock stopped maturing at the age of 7. The only thing he wants, after all this time, is for someone to approve of him. He'd never admit it. But those who have children in their lives know what to look for, and if they tried, they'd see that same desperate need for love and approval in the detective.

John would not approve of anything Sherlock was doing, that was for sure. And Sherlock just couldn't stop.

He started to go too far. Cut too deep. Take too much. The lines of reality were blurring, becoming scrubbed out with an enormous eraser. He couldn't see the harm in adding that littlest bit of extra effort to any one of his temporary solutions. As long as it stopped him thinking.

He was lying on the couch one day after taking an exceptional amount of cocaine and it occurred to him that he was going to die. It wasn't an epiphany, per se, and it didn't particularly alarm him. It just popped into his head and it was, dare we say, rather similar to that feeling you get when you add up all your accounts and realize quite calmly that you cannot pay your electric bill. It's matter of fact, you do not panic, you don't really even do anything about it, and you just realize that it's going to be part of life now. Sherlock was going to die. What was on the telly for him to correct? There wasn't anything he felt like he needed to do, any 'unfinished business', per se.

He did want John to get away. John deserved better. Sherlock was going down and he didn't want John to be dragged with him. John could have a family, a life, someone who could take care of him if he so desired. He didn't need a mad consulting detective who was incapable of dealing with something as petty as carpal tunnel. Sherlock started picking fights, trying to make John angry enough that he'd pack up and leave for good. It never worked and Sherlock could not figure out why. It never even entered his mind that John could want this, this life with him.

But John was still there after Sherlock had set the microwave on fire and snogged the barista in Speedy's and dashed out in front of a taxi. There had been impromptu visits at work and extreme rudeness towards Anderson and text after text while John was in Dublin and tongues in with the cottage cheese and one memorable time where a certain jumper was dyed pink and shrunk after going in with the wrong load of wash (that really had been an accident). Even after the jumper incident, John was still there. Then, and only then, did Sherlock realize that he wasn't going to leave. And then the only thing he thought of was that he had nicked a pair of Lestrade's handcuffs the day before yesterday and that he had not properly fucked John in a very long time.

So Sherlock did end up handcuffing John to the headboard, and eventually John kneed him in the face to get his attention and yelled in one of his more eloquent fashions, "You wanker, get me out of these things right now so I can get you on your back before I fucking explode," a request which Sherlock was all too happy to oblige.

The next day, they overslept and Sarah ended up calling and receiving a John who alternated between fairly convincing excuses and yelling at Sherlock to get out from underneath the covers; a man, Sarah thought, on a not-entirely-honorable mission. Then finally, they got out of bed and John took a shower and Sherlock burnt the toast and scraped the blackened bits off of John's piece before he could notice. And John ran out the door with his hair still wet and his shoes untied, toothpaste and a sloppy kiss lingering in the corners of his mouth, and Sherlock got in the shower and did not cry.

John came home that night with shopping bags and tired feet and the first thing he noticed was the emptiness. The flat felt so – well, flat. He could neither see nor hear nor smell Sherlock, so he assumed that he had gone out. But then he was putting the groceries away and he looked over and saw Sherlock's coat hanging on the back of the sitting room door.

In books, you often hear about foreshadowing. In reality this is rarely the case. It's not that humans can't see things like that. Rather, we have evolved to block out all terrible things, simply because it is easier to turn away from a problem than it is to acknowledge it. John knew something was wrong, of course he did, but he did not want to admit it because that would make it real and he couldn't face it. The possibility, the truth, was staggering and empty and waiting to swallow him and his brain said _No!_ and stayed deluded for just a second longer.

And then he went upstairs and saw the bedroom door shut, and that was when the sense of terror engulfed him because Sherlock never closed doors all the way, and especially nowadays, he never, ever let a piece of wood separate him and John like that. So John knew what he would find even before he opened the door and looked inside.

Blood.

Too much blood.

Sherlock.

Who was too still.

John climbed on the bed, amidst all that blood, and pulled out his mobile with one hand and tried to apply pressure to every cut he could with the other while dialing and that was when he saw it, written under the gash that was hopefully too far to the right of the heart.

_Empty._


	3. Chapter 3

**Hi, ladies. First of all, well, wow. Thanks. That's all I can say.  
>Second of all: for those of you who don't know, I'm leaving on a trip to Spain on Tuesday. I'll be gone for two weeks and will not have access to Internet or my laptop while away. Hopefully this'll tide you over. Rest assured, though, I will be writing on those numerous 8-hour plane rides ;)<br>Written to "Blinding" by Florence + the Machine.  
>Disclaimer: Guess wha-at…I got an iPod touch, a cartilage piercing, and a 71 on my CLEP test. In one weekend. MY LIFE IS COMPLETE! Wait, no, not really, because I DON'T OWN SHERLOCK. SO.<br>Warnings: This chapter isn't that bad. But this fic is going to have bits (or lots) of these fun topics: self injury, drugs, carpal tunnel, emotional confuzzlement, and ESPECIALLY depression. If any of the above things regularly trigger you, could potentially trigger you, or have been triggering you recently, don't read. I like reviews, yeah, but you guys are a thousand times more important.**

There is nothing worse than the morning after.

You wake up and it might be a nice day. It might be raining. Either way, you're awake, and you look around and think "Hmm, I wonder what happens today" or "Noooo, five more minutes, five more minutes…" or "Ouch, my neck" or "Agh, where are my trousers?" You feel refreshed, happy, maybe. It's morning. What's not to like?

And then it slams back, physically slams into you and you know this because you are actually winded from the force of it. You realize that you were asleep on the floor of a relative's house or in the chair of the hospital waiting room or in the backseat of your car, and once you realize that it all floods back. Then you have a choice – you can either roll over and feign sleep or spring up and try and kick into action but it won't work. Because there is nothing, and I repeat, nothing, you can do. You cannot help it, that vague it being someone in pain or someone dead or something else truly awful happening. Your life has just changed in a way you never could imagine. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

John awoke in the hospital waiting room at about 1. (For the record, it was technically the morning after.) It had been 5:16 PM when he found Sherlock. 15 minutes to hospital. Then they had bandaged his cuts but not properly treated them because of a pileup on the M3, which had then elicited almost 2 hours of waiting. And then there were hours of blood transfusions and skin grafts on his ankle and ear and surgeries and medication and Mrs. Hudson had left, then Mycroft, and finally it was just John. As always.

He had dozed off ridiculously early (only about half ten) but he had had a tough day at work, and then he had gone home and had an even tougher time of it. The adrenaline had begun to ebb out of his system a little after six, but then Sherlock had gone into the operating room and John's hand had started to almost imperceptibly tremble. But after hours of waiting, all the remaining energy had shot out of his system as quickly and thoroughly as if someone had pressed a big red button, and he had fallen asleep.

He was going into unchartered territory now.

He knew that Sherlock was stuck. Broken. Whatever you may call it, Sherlock was not okay. He was the polar opposite of okay. And yes, he knew that it was Sherlock that was going to get all the attention, and Sherlock who was the one with the real problem, but John was hurting now too. He couldn't even begin to go into it. It was guilt, and anger, and sadness, and something that tasted bitter but had no name. _You've rather shown your hand, Doctor Watson_. Well, his hand was a royal flush of nasty little thoughts and feelings right now. It had been John's responsibility to watch Sherlock, to make sure that he was okay, and how on earth had he EVER let that brilliant man end up like this? How? It was so little, so very little to ask of John, and yet he had failed.

John didn't know what to do first. What he could do first. As long as Sherlock was in hospital, he was left with care of the ordinary, mundane things. He wouldn't be able to work anymore. Sherlock would be put on suicide watch, and he would hate it and be insufferable and sulky and only John would be tolerated, that much was for sure. John would have to tell the Yarders. Anderson. Donovan. Dimmock. All those young constables. Sherlock had been their hero, someone they equally admired and feared in measure. Lestrade had two daughters who positively adored Sherlock. What would the DI tell them? And money. Oh, God, the money. He'd have to ask Mycroft for help, which he knew would drive Sherlock positively mad, but there was just no way. His paycheck from the surgery barely began to cover their needs on a normal day and all the medications and the psychiatrist wouldn't be completely covered by the NHS. Sherlock was going to need a psychiatrist. Sherlock was going to need this, Sherlock was going to need that.

John's thoughts were tumbling round and round the edges of the biggest nagging question in his head; the elephant in his mind, if you will. It was making him uncomfortable. He was going to have to confront his main thoughts sometime. He hated evading them. He hated it. He couldn't lie to himself, now, could he? Would he? He was lying. He was.

Stop it, Watson, you're driving yourself mad. You can't go crazy now too. Sherlock needs someone to pay the bills on time because he's completely incapacitated. Sherlock needs you, specifically, even though he's not going to admit that.

John dropped his face into his hands. The night had barely even started, really. The metaphorical night. Technically, somewhere in the world it was always night. But by that logic it was also always day. And now he was getting philosophical. He needed a cuppa. And sleep, more sleep.

But what had happened?

That was it, there was no going back now. He had asked that question that had been whirling around and around in his skull, the one that nobody would have the courage to ask either of them to their faces. What happened? John had replayed the scene more than a hundred times in his head by now – Sherlock on the bed. Sherlock still on the bed. Sherlock still and absolutely drenched in blood on the bed. It had been like watching through a camera lens at first, so disconnected and it couldn't be real, it couldn't, because Sherlock had been smiling, laughing that morning. He had made toast, for Christ's sake! He could not have done this, he couldn't have!

And then John had climbed on that bed, felt blood begin seeping through the knees of his jeans, and his first thought had been _My God, I'm too late_. He had started to panic when he could not staunch the bleeding, and then he had really seen the cuts, all those cuts up and down the pale forearms and on his chest and hands and ankle and oh, God, his ear, he had practically attacked his ear, and oh, Jesus, how could he have let this happen, let it get this bad in Sherlock's head?

Sherlock was AGAINST suicide. Very vocally. He abhorred it. He maintained that it was for people who were dull. Sometimes, though, when he said that, John heard that normally unfazeable voice waver and crack. Sherlock had, at one point, not thought suicide dull. He said that now because he was expected to. At some point, it had been drilled into him that he was not allowed to like suicide, to think about it.

But that conditioning would not have been enough, would it? John knew firsthand how very stubborn Sherlock was. People could not make him believe something he didn't want to. So part of Sherlock, part of his conscious working hard drive, had rejected suicide. He wasn't avoiding it out of fear, because things like that didn't scare Sherlock. Hell, no. And he wasn't against it because he valued other people's beliefs and opinions. Unfortunately, that seemed the least likely option.

Something had gone horribly wrong inside Sherlock's mind for him to try and commit suicide. And it hadn't been there that morning. Sherlock could act, but not that well. Something had happened, something tremendous, in the 8 hours John had been gone. Something big enough to make Sherlock abandon what he believed. Something big enough to make Sherlock give up. Sherlock. Give up.

There was so much that went on in that brilliant head that John knew he wouldn't be able to explain to the doctors, and then there was so much that went on that John didn't understand or know about. He was fine with that, he really was. But things could go so many ways from here, and things could go very badly, and what if they took Sherlock away and put him in a psych ward, what if they gave him meds that made him wonky, what if they tried to make him stop working, what if, what if, what if.

John needed to stop thinking.

Then the swinging doors opened and Sherlock's pretty young doctor stuck her head out and said "Doctor Watson?" and John was up, on his feet.

…

Sherlock woke up.

Which was wrong.

He opened his eyes then shut them again, because – no. He was dead, he had died, he had killed himself just so he would not end up in this position. No. He wasn't awake. He couldn't be awake. He had died.

And then he reopened his eyes.

It was a hospital room. What a dull, ordinary place, a hospital room. So bland and generic, all white and beige with the occasional spot of blue or pink. It is a curious phenomenon, the hospital room. One would think that a room destined to help people regain life would be a bit more lively, but that's never really the case. Sherlock thought he might go mad from the boredom.

He noticed John wasn't there. And he was glad. He hoped that John had found him, called the ambulance, and then been so angry that he had just left. He didn't want to see John. He couldn't face him. No, no, no, that wasn't it. He just didn't want John here. He could face him easily. How silly of him. How – sentimental? Was that sentiment? No, it was an emotion. But he'd eradicated emotions. That thought could not exist, because emotion could not exist. So therefore, facing John would not be a problem. Logic. All he needed was logic. It was numbers versus colors. Numbers were much more correct.

A nurse came in and busied herself with his vitals. "How are we doing, sweetheart?" she asked, which Sherlock did not dignify with a response. She flipped up the top page of his chart and said, "Looks like you're due for another dose of painkillers, yeah?"

Something about that set off a little alarm bell in the back of Sherlock's brain. In a past life, when he was a past man, they didn't want him on painkillers. Something about –

Addiction.

What?

No.

Yes.

He was addicted to painkillers?

Why? Why that, too?

Stop. Thinking. Just stop it. Stop being sentimental, and stop processing emotions, and stop it, Sherlock Aldous Holmes. Deductions. Deduce using data. It functions and you know that for sure. Stop it.

"I don't want to take them."

And then he had to go and open his mouth, of course.

The nurse raised her eyebrows.

"It doesn't hurt that badly. Really."

"Whatever you say, love." She jabbed the needle into the IV and depressed the plunger and all of that morphine tricked slowly, slowly, slowly through the vein in his hand up through his arm and into the nerves in the spinal cord, up to the brain stem and then cycling into the limbic system, releasing neurotransmitters and upping dopamine levels in his cerebral cortex and Sherlock smiled, a predatory, terrifying smile, as he fell back asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Well, I'm really unimpressed with this chapter. But read it and let me know what you think. It might seem better to you all. Spain was lovely and I got quite a few first drafts vomited out. A couple one shots too. So let the updating commence!  
>Now that it's summer, I'm beginning the move over to AO3. I was going to anyway, but the purge going on here has convinced me. Where my girls go, I go. My profile name is the same, ongreenergrasses, and hopefully I will see a couple of you over there. I'll try to keep my stuff regular on FF as long as I can, but I'm sure that someday I'll have to switch for good.<br>Written to "Pennyroyal Tea (Acoustic)" by Nirvana  
>Disclaimer: No. Just…no.<br>Warnings: Not much up in this baby.**

There was nothing much to remark on for those next few days.

John was just left there. Nobody asked about John, and someone really should have because John had a history, a dark history, of reacting badly to trauma. Emotional, physical, it didn't matter, because either way he took it hard and very oddly. But John was not the suicidal one, John was not the one tucked up in a hospital bed. John was perfectly fine – right?

If you don't know the answer to that question, you don't deserve to know more.

It was automatic robotics for the first full day Sherlock was in hospital. He made a few phone calls, sorted out the most pressing logistical nightmares. Asked Mrs. Hudson if she could please wait on the rent payment for another week and she burst into tears on the phone line. John didn't cry. He hadn't cried at all. He didn't feel like he would cry, or could cry. He thought maybe his tear glands had shriveled up and died but it was difficult to tell.

They tried to send him home and John refused. Flat out refused. They would have had to drag him, actually, bodily drag him out the doors and stuff him in a cab and then drag him up the steps of the flat and lock him in his bedroom to get him to leave and stay away. He was staying, and if you didn't like that, it was no secret that John Watson was an army captain and knew exactly how to cause a big fuss. If he had to throw his weight around to stay with Sherlock, so be it. Luckily, Sherlock's doctor was a romantic, and John bedded down on the tile of Sherlock's section of the ward. Whenever a nurse came by, he would very subtly scoot himself under the hospital bed for a reason he did not understand.

Day two was when he realized he would have to eat sometime. It wasn't really a pressing need, but it was there. It existed. So he went down to the cafeteria, but he couldn't bring himself to order anything. Just looking at all that food, and none of it appetizing, and he eventually turned around and walked back upstairs.

Molly came by that afternoon. She didn't even bother to see Sherlock, just took John and pulled him back downstairs. It turned out that she had ordered almost everything in the cafeteria and it all sat in the middle of a table in the leftmost corner of the room, a table occupied by Lestrade and Anthea and one of the younger constables. She had managed to fit all the food on three trays, with a fourth reserved for napkins and paper plates and little cups of ketchup and mustard.

John didn't think he would be able to eat.

And then he started eating and polished off the contents of an entire tray, while Anthea daintily ate twice as much as him in half the time and Molly and Lestrade talked and the young constable occasionally nibbled on an eggroll.

The chatter from everyone in the cafeteria, including his tablemates, swirled around and around John. He was reminded of making marbled prints, he believed they were called, where you used inks and oils and made swirls of color all over a page. In this case, he was the page and they were drawing and scribbling all over him.

It turned out that his tablemates had all turned up to ask questions. Not horribly intrusive or insensitive ones, no, not at all. In theory. But in practice, every word someone said to John was an intrusion. He just didn't want to talk about it. He was reminded of it every second now, and 'it' did not need any more attention, now or ever. Let them all talk, but let them talk about the lottery. Or Anderson. Or cooking pad thai. Let them talk about random mundane things like what they saw on telly last night or their favorite books or how awful that new Springsteen album was, for God's sake. Everyone came up to him with that same condescending understanding smile, that look that said _Why, of course you can talk to ME about it, John, how dare you think otherwise? Don't you want to talk about it? Don't you, John? _And the answer was no. He did not want to talk about it. They didn't understand that he wanted to talk about last Saturday's footie match and complain about the weather. All he wanted was to have a conversation about something normal, something random, something mundane, something that didn't matter. But instead there was this thing hanging over him and he was faced with discussing it, every time a new person met him he had to discuss it, and he was tired of it. But of course he didn't say anything. He never said anything. No, instead he sat there and took the questions and smiled.

Molly needed to ask where Sherlock had put some of the pipettes in the lab and Lestrade wanted to know when (and really, if, although he didn't say it) they could expect Sherlock back at work and the constable was wondering about – well, John honestly had no idea what she wanted. She had been chewing gum and speaking quickly and all he'd gotten was something about China and bananas.

Anthea had wanted to know if John would like someone to go in and clean up the flat for him. Which was a good question. John had rushed out and left the place in an absolutely terrifying state. And who knew what would happen if he went back there.

Well, trauma is funny. It affects people in the strangest ways. One of John's fellow doctors at the surgery had, after his girlfriend's death, gone and baked twenty-three cheese soufflés and then given them all to his elderly neighbor. And he dimly remembered, in medical school, his roommate running over the phone with his car after his sister went into a coma. Anything John did at this point was, in comparison, quite normal. And wanting to clean up his own flat was perfectly justified.

So, on the morning of the third day, John took a taxi back to Baker Street.

And he just cleaned it up. No fuss. The sheets, dear God, well, sheets that expensive must have a warranty or something similar. If not, IKEA was going to provide for His Royal Higharse because John figured that the laws of the universe only allowed you to pay for 300-thread count once. Anyway, they were pretty much destroyed, so he wadded them up and put them in a trash bag. Then he found the X-Acto knife on the floor where Sherlock had dropped it, and it had to be the most hateful thing John had ever seen. He put that in the trash bag also.

He found his razor on the dresser. Sherlock must have put it down there and it looked like a sick joke, spots of brown that had dripped off the blade staining the wood. Sherlock had used his, John's, razor. John had no idea why. Sherlock's was a) much higher quality and b) easier to find, due to Sherlock's phobia of putting anything in a cupboard, but no. He had used John's razor. If it had been anyone else, John would have said it was due to emotions or nostalgia or something, but this was Sherlock. John had literally no idea what that man had been thinking, and he sincerely doubted that Sherlock himself had known what he was thinking when –

Anyway, he had completely destroyed the razor and John wasn't about to spend two hours trying to get off all the blood stains when he could just buy a new one for ten pound. So that was also banished to the trash bag.

He found the violin on the living room floor. Some part of him noted that he could most likely be piecing things together if he wanted to, deducing what had happened, but that was Sherlock's job. John wasn't going to infringe on that. He honestly didn't give a damn about what had happened. It was what it had led Sherlock to do that mattered.

The violin had a large crack down the back. John knew it hadn't been there before, and he also knew that their life's savings would not even begin to cover the cost of fixing the crack. So he put the Guarneri back on the shelf, for lack of a better place, and hoped that Mycroft would do as he had with the bow (namely sneak in, steal the violin, pay for all repairs, and then return it just as sneakily).

He was just waiting to lose it. To find something that would trigger him, make him cry and gnash his teeth and make him feel like an actor in an Oscar-nominated movie, but the truth was there was nothing there. Just ordinary objects scattered around.

He put the bag in a bin out back and got another cab back to the hospital.

…

Anthea was a good PA. She had been in such high demand that it had taken Mycroft an enormous amount of work (or more than usual, at least) to get her on his staff. Although an unlikely candidate at first, after the fifth rude phone call telling Mycroft to piss off, he had thrown all other sixteen applications in the trash and called the girl back.

She was beautiful. She was charming. She was enigmatic. She knew exactly how to get what she wanted when she wanted it through at least four different types of persuasion. She was the girl everyone wanted to be next to just because of the aura she emitted, condescending and uplifting at the same time. She looked down her nose at you, treated you like just a cog in the great machine of her plans (which you were), but at the same time, when she was looking at you you felt like one of the most privileged people in the world.

And yet.

If a girl in the office came and brought cups of tea for all, she would always hand Anthea one with an apologetic smile and a "I didn't know what kind you wanted, luv, so I got you _x_". Nobody knew that the little blue banged up Toyota belonged to the sleek, polished woman who was the right hand of the most powerful man in the country. And if you'd asked anyone what her favorite telly show was, well, nobody would ever be able to tell you that it was Six Feet Under.

Nobody knew Anthea. Nobody even knew her real name. She didn't discuss her personal life, ever. Her colleagues knew her as studious, but with a chatty streak inside. Someone who was clever but worthy of your trust. People would find themselves spilling their souls to her, just because she would nod seriously and listen. She was always up for debates on politics and religion and women's rights. She talked all the time, but she never actually said anything. Nobody noticed.

And so nobody knew what had happened when Mycroft contacted her.

She had gone in for an early night, and her husband had ordered a pizza and they had sat on the sofa and eaten as they watched The Hour; Danny kept up a stream of commentary throughout the programme, which he knew annoyed her beyond belief. She had actually silenced her BlackBerry for once, and eventually they had abandoned the telly in favor of some slow, gentle kissing, and then she had collapsed, almost asleep, in his lap. Her husband reached around her and grabbed his book and sat and read, occasionally pressing a kiss to her hair or temples.

Then the phone had vibrated on the table and Anthea had shot up, wide awake, and her poor long-suffering husband sighed. She read the text. And then ran, wild eyed, into the bedroom and came out five minutes later with her hair brushed, eyeliner reapplied, wearing a skirt instead of old jeans and having exchanged her football socks for pumps.

"You all right, bub?" Danny asked her, worried now. He'd never seen his calm, cool, collected-at-all-times wife act so flustered.

"Fine, fine," Anthea said distractedly, grabbing her purse off the counter and scrabbling in the dish for her keys. "I don't know when I'll get home. Might be in Korea for a few days, you can never tell with things like this." _Korea? Dear God, woman, if you can't tell Dan how this is bothering you then who can you tell?_

"Text me if you need to."

Anthea loved to drive, and she loved to wear high heels, and she loved her hidden tattoo, all for the same reason. All three things made her feel powerful. Competent. Like she could take on anything and everything because she was just as good as any man, and better than quite a few she could mention. She could go places, she could do what she wanted, she could easily take care of herself and she didn't have to rely on anyone else. Ever.

While driving she could forget. She had to concentrate on her turn blinker and the speed limit and a thousand other things. She could watch the road fly past and look at all the other cars and make up stories about each driver, which was one of the only habits left over from her childhood. She didn't have to remember, or think, or imply, or assume. Old memories could stay buried, new theories didn't get the necessary time to gestate and mature.

She got in her Toyota and just drove. Around and around, out of the neighborhood and through the next one over, on overpasses and in tunnels, zigzagging back and forth across London until the clock hit 4 AM and she went to get a coffee. She was in the office by 4:30, going through paperwork and making phone calls, and when Mycroft came in bleary-eyed at 6 she greeted him with a cup of English Breakfast and her usual "Good morning, sir."

"Thank you, Anthea."

She nodded curtly and returned to her desk, sifting through the newest memos and checking her emails and putting folders to one side or another, calling a few cabinet members regarding Tuesday's vote and reminding her secretary LeeAnn to send in the insurance forms for the (disowned) member of the royal family that had been in a traffic accident. As soon as all the truly crucial things were finished, she began on the folders, and Mycroft did not see her in his office again until 2 PM, when she stuck her head in the door and said, "Sir, I believe your brother's violin will need to be shipped back to Italy for repairs."

Mycroft nodded. Did not regale her with three times the information she needed to perform the desired task. Just nodded. Anthea could read people, and she knew many people better than she had any right to, and she knew that Mycroft nodding was the equivalent of an ordinary bloke bursting into tears.

She snapped the door closed and went to ask LeeAnn about any upcoming government flights to Italy, and whether the humidity on them was regulated. Because she was a PA, and her function was to cover for everybody else, never letting them see how she was affected. Because nobody else knew that she, Anthea, knew a thing or two about suicide.


	5. Chapter 5

**Hi.  
>I apologize profusely for the extraordinary lateness of this chapter. My depression has been giving me hell; add that to writer's block, and you've got the complete mix of nothing. I do hope that someone is still out there and wants to read this, and I also hope that you will not have to wait so long next time but that's up to my mind.<br>This chapter is here because of two people. John Green, for reinspiring me with his gorgeous, gorgeous writing, and Terra. Just because when I told her that I had written a chapter, she textscreamed and let me know how excited she was to read it :)  
>Written to "Samskeyti (Live)" by Sigur Ros.<br>Disclaimer: These are thoughts drawn from me. But the characters in which they placed are not.**

They gave him pills and sent him home. Just like that.

Really, he should have been sectioned. He had tried to commit suicide (which was right there a perfect reason in itself) but not only that, he had done it in such a manner as to cause incredible harm to himself. It was not self harming or suicidal tendencies, it was true hatred of his very being. The only safe place for Sherlock, the only true safe place, would be in the embrace of a straitjacket But doctors are doctors, and they know nothing of the diseases they treat. They couldn't see that. Mycroft intervened.

And after all the paperwork and politics was said and done, Sherlock got up, put his clothes on, and walked right out the door, John hurrying with the pills in his wake.

There was no word, no action, no sound that obviously affected Sherlock. Nothing could hurt him. You'd have thought he'd been in hospital for a broken wrist. He wasn't triggered by anything, he wasn't different at all. He had become so excellent in the art of disguise that nobody, nobody could tell that there was anything wrong at all. Nobody could see a difference.

But the difference WAS there. Oh, it was there, sitting and lurking, waiting until he was alone at his most defenseless; then it pounced, a pain so deep and terrible that he could not do anything but curl up and wait for it to pass.

It always passed.

Sometimes he would try to make himself cry, foolish as it was. He had never been soft-hearted by nature and after the fiasco that was secondary school, what little empathy he had left was leached out of him completely. Or so he thought. He alone could reduce himself to tears, he was the only one who know what would have him crying in minutes and he employed these things, to try and cry and let the emotions take their course.

It didn't work.

He was furious, confused. He had done everything in his power to avoid this one awful outcome. He was not nearly as broken, as 'messed up' as his injuries made him appear. But now he was dead inside and constantly monitored out, because a suicide attempt could not be explained away. You could not rationalize a suicide attempt to the doctors. Suicide was the one truly unforgiveable act, and now here he was with bandages on his wrist and bottles of pills, his head whirling at light speed and his mind unable to catalogue and process his thoughts.

And it all came back to that violin. Of course it did. It was all because of that violin, because everyone knew that Sherlock Holmes didn't just give up. Sherlock was better than that, stronger than that, and EVERYONE knew it. It could be blamed on the violin, and what was someone to do about that? You couldn't take the violin away from Sherlock, because that would worsen his condition, but at the same time there was no way you could ever give it back to him.

He had had no idea. How much it meant, how much just the music meant to him. He had used it, manipulated it, almost abused it. Emotions he hadn't even been aware of had been flushed out of his system before he could be hurt by them. The extent of that violin's influence had been so deep he hadn't even realized it. Sherlock would never have stopped playing, but all this time he had always believed unconsciously that if the need ever arose he would be able to. He had never comprehended this devastation, this total disaster left behind by a pinched nerve.

The carpal tunnel was not the worst bit, either.

It was impossible to explain any of this, but Sherlock could understand it perfectly. The information was so contradicting that it seemed impossible that such things could exist, and yet they did. His carpal tunnel, crippling him and preventing him from playing, had sent him into a downward spiral so destructive that now? He had lost his inspiration.

Yes, he had lost his very inspiration, that spark, that life. Some time between waking in that dreadful hospital room and strolling out of it, his inspiration and motivation and creative impulses and god knew what else had just flown away. He would not have been able to play music now even if his hands had been at their prime. Notes would come out, infinite in their complexity but stilted and metronomic in their musicality. They would have been void of everything.

Sherlock had lost his musicality and he hated that loss. Despised it. Abhorred it. The ugliest expletive in the world could not describe how he hated that loss. No matter what pills he took (and he was taking them, oh yes, definitely taking them), or what therapists he talked to, he knew deep inside that he would never truly heal, never resemble his "normal" until that musicality was restored. And he wasn't going to sit around waiting for it to come back, no, he was going to fight. He was stubborn, some might call him stupid, but no matter what he would fight for his music; everything else could die and rot and he would not give an armoir's fuck but not his music. He would fight until his last breath for his music, and that right now was what was keeping him going, sending him to that damned idiot therapist, swallowing his pills. Every single breath he took was dragging him back to his music, and he would not rest till he found it again.

Or so it seemed.

Then he got tired.

It got so _hard_ because he was just so _tired_ and he could barely move, barely talk through a conversation before his body screamed in protest and his mind shut down. He'd rush through whatever he was doing and then all but fly back to the sanctuary of his bedroom or his sofa. He'd ignore a saddened John, a distressed Mrs. Hudson, a bemused Lestrade, an indifferent Anthea, and just flop down and lie still, very, _very_ still…

And so the cycle restarted.

It took him weeks to gather enough energy for a journey outside the flat, and even then he could only stay away for about 2 hours. Then his head had started to hurt and what felt like his entire chest had caved in and he had bolted. Right in the middle of a sentence. He had left, nearly had a panic attack in the back of the taxi and John had had to unlock the flat door because Sherlock's hands had been shaking so badly there was no way he could do it. Sherlock had dashed upstairs and climbed into bed, arms wrapped tight around himself to give an illusion of comfort he so desperately needed and when John finally broke through the door that had been locked sometime in the night, the cup of tea on the nightstand had sat all night untouched and the figure in the bed was trembling.

Sherlock didn't go outside after that.

He didn't go anywhere.

He sat.

And he knew this was death, because life could not hurt so badly.


	6. Author's Note

**Hello ladies.**

**I hope you're all doing magnificently, as you deserve. Also, sorry for startling you and making you all excited for a new chapter :/ This is just an author's note. A kind of extensive one.**

**To get straight to the point, I'm officially putting this story on hiatus. As in putting that in the summary, as in warning people through an excessively long author's note, and not just leaving you all hanging cause that's rude. (I apologize for that by the way, luvvies.) It's for a variety of reasons – real life is sort of taking over, I can't figure out where it's going to go, my muse is flying off to Bermuda for a vacation – but mostly it's just because I'm pretty worried I'm not doing the topic justice. This is where my experience with these kinds of situations ends so far. Also, I'm definitely at a block. I think I know what will happen in the end, but it's a matter of getting from Point A to Point D and hitting everything in between.**

**So yeah. I'll leave the chapters up for your viewing pleasure, and hopefully the muse will return to me in time. But who knows. I might take them down and redo them all if I decide to go a different place with the fic, and I might take them all down and just leave them down out of frustration.**

**I wish you guys could get a conclusion, but honestly there are so many ways that this fic could go –**

**Basically I think it'll be safer to warn you all that this is on hiatus, and then give myself some time to regroup and get the muse back in gear and finish up some of the zillions of other fics I've got floating around. That's not factoring real life into the equation at this point, either. I've got a couple things there that I need to get sorted, and quite a lot of schoolwork that's been unceremoniously flung at me, and medications and birthdays and all that junk.**

**However, this isn't all bad news. **

**As some of you know, I've had a scene written for a very, very long time, and based most of the fic off it. Just for continuity. It was basically backstory for me, and I wasn't sure if I was ever going to publish it, but just because I feel terribly guilty leaving you all like this I suppose I shall. I hope it'll provide you all with some closure, in case I don't return to this fic. **

**So yes. Enjoy this last chapter, and I'll try and return to you all as soon as I can. Not sure what fandom I'll come back with, though, so keep on your toes…**


	7. Chapter 6

**So. Here we are with the final establishment – for now. This is set during the timeline of chapter 2. It is a in depth account of Sherlock's breakdown, and I'm not sure if any of my readers have ever had a nervous and/or psychotic breakdown (if so, I send hugs) but if you have you know the nastiness that it entails.  
><strong>**That said, you may have an idea of what you're about to get into. If not, this is insanity, pure and simple. There is a lot of self harm in this chapter, and references to depression and suicide. Sherlock may seem OOC, but keep in mind that I know this and that I've tried my best to accurately describe a state in which you completely lose your head and all but become someone else for a time. If any of these above things are going to bother you in the slightest, please DO NOT read this chapter.  
><strong>**And now I've kind of spoiled the chapter for all of you :D Ah well.**

It had been stupid, stupid. A stupid idea. Sherlock was astounded at his own stupidity. If it had been John's suggestion, John's idea, well, that would have been one thing. John, although intelligent and tolerable and far from mundane, did have a tendency to say the most idiotic things at times. But this was himself, Sherlock Holmes. He was clever, always clever, all he ever had was his intelligence, and he should not give into fits of sentiment like that. Ever. He was a machine, always working, stripped of his humanity – but that wasn't quite true, now, was it.

John had brought back some of that humanity when he limped into Sherlock's life. Sherlock hadn't realized what had been missing until he was running across rooftops with John, eating in cafes with John, laughing and talking with John. When he was with John he could feel everything. He had been numb and cold and he'd thought he liked it but John had taken the machine in his hands and stroked it, rubbed some warmth back into the cold metal workings.

It didn't really matter that he could feel. He'd discovered that there wasn't anything wrong, per se, with feeling. It did not have the ability to affect his logic and deductions because feelings were associated with John – what he felt about John, how John felt about things. They did not enter into cases. But Sherlock was not allowed sentiment. Not ever. Not with John, not with work, not with anything, because sentiment was crippling and useless. It was what destroyed humanity. Feelings could, in the right hands, become weapons. (After all, an angry, grief-stricken man is a thousand times more dangerous than an indifferent one.) But sentiment could never be a weapon. Sentiment just ruined its owner. It was purposeless, useless. He was not allowed sentiment. Ever.

Sherlock had felt better that morning. He wasn't sure why. He thought that maybe his shagging John had helped channel out some of those feelings cluttering up his head, or maybe it was just a lovely day outside, but either way he felt lighter that morning. He wasn't happy, and he wasn't okay, but he was good enough to cook toast (if that was really considered cooking) and good enough to tease John, good enough to chase him around the house and catch him with a kiss. When he was sufficiently late to work, John ran down the stairs yelling "I'm stopping at Tesco's after work so I might be a bit late…don't break anything, I love you," over his shoulder, and Sherlock was left standing in the middle of the room in his dressing gown, grinning like he was completely deranged (which was possible) and feeling like he would burst from love and a brief fleeting feeling of happiness (which wasn't).

Things had proceeded somewhat normally from then on. He'd taken a shower and eaten his now-cold toast and begun work on his latest experiment, which involved a human brain (not fresh, sadly) and its response to different types of stimuli – something that had already been done, for sure, but he was sure he could find something that those ordinary people hadn't. Inside, he had felt almost balanced. For months he had felt empty, void of everything, feelings, ideas, _everything_; or full of anger and passion and darkness that couldn't escape, always crushing him, surrounding him, drowning him; and now he was halfway to stable. What a blissful feeling it is, after months of up and down and tumultuous noise and living a nightmare to finally balance out! After all that agony, the eye of the storm surrounds you with calm and everything stacks itself precariously on the scale of dark versus light. (Sherlock's scale had a little more black than white, but that was to be expected as he was clinically depressed, after all.)

He was concentrating so hard on those goddamn feelings that he wasn't thinking rationally. We said before that feelings didn't impede his deductions, and that was true. But he couldn't have both systems working at once. His feelings, his emotions, were soaring higher than the sky and crushing all rationality into the dirt. He was thinking at his normal pace, but he wasn't analyzing and processing properly.

He didn't even notice what he was doing, not after he picked it up, not after scales and arpeggios. It was his body's fault. It was acting on what had been pure habit, because Sherlock expressed happiness through his violin and now he was through the etude and onto Shostakovich.

It was a good choice. The third movement was safe. Nothing hurt because although it was technically difficult, it wasn't that strenuous. And Sherlock was enjoying himself, just letting everything go away, all his walls breaking down and he felt so relaxed and happy and he honestly couldn't remember the last time he had been okay like this. Had he ever been okay, really, properly, okay? It was impossible to tell. But he didn't care, because he was okay NOW and that was all that mattered.

The octaves just fluttered by. His hand didn't even twitch. Muscle memory was such a remarkable thing, really. Even after all those trials and all this time, his fingers remembered the exact amount of space between the As and the F-sharps and everything else in between. He was a little worried about the cadenza, but that went by easily as well. He was fine, now, it had just been his transport acting up, and it was healed now. He hadn't even needed surgeries. How silly, to get so worked up about something so trivial.

It was halfway through the burlesque that everything fell to hell.

He was climbing up and up and reaching higher and higher for the harmonics and then he went back down for the G string and that was when everything exploded. Inside his wrist, that is. Something inside ruptured (or at least it felt like it) and he snatched his hand away, completely forgetting the laws of gravity and the violin slipped out from under his chin and fell just like that.

That wasn't what ruined Sherlock, though. Don't think for one second that the fall of the violin, or even the failure to play, was what caused him to really, properly lose it. He was past the failure to play, actually. The violin had gone. He had taught himself to cope, albeit not well. The violin had come back. Not really. Sherlock deleted things and already he had begun the process of deleting emotions and events that were closely connected with his music. It was okay that he couldn't play, really. It didn't seem like it at the time, but that wasn't the biggest issue.

He was furious that his body had dared to defy his mind, to directly disobey him. It had wanted to play, after all, and when he had properly realized that he was playing, he had decided that he would continue. And now his transport was rebelling, acting against him.

Then this wave of realization slammed into him and his mouth dropped open and his other hand dropped the bow that Mycroft had thoughtfully had repaired.

He had been wrong.

It hadn't been his transport's fault.

His brain had been wrong.

Sherlock was never wrong, ever, about anything. He just wasn't. He was the one people feared and hated and shunned because he was always, always right. He wasn't wrong. That could not be, it could not even exist as a possibility, because the word "wrong" could not apply to Sherlock.

But it could.

He had kept going because he had thought he could do it. All the while his body had protested and he had ignored it, dismissed those little twinges during the augmented arpeggio and the sixteenth notes in the beginning of the burlesque. It wasn't that he hadn't been able to so much as _he had been wrong_, not about some mundane ordinary person, but about himself. His own hard drive had been wrong about his own transport.

That was not acceptable.

If you have ever felt like Sherlock, if you have ever snapped like he did then, you might remember the one action or word that triggered the disaster that came next. Once that thing was out there, you were raw. You were primal. Reason wasn't there, judgment flew out the window. And you did something horrible, something twisted and sick, something so stupid to try and punish yourself, to make yourself pay for your mistakes.

Sherlock couldn't help that he had been wrong. He couldn't reverse it. So he pushed that incorrect deduction back to the bonfire of rage and action and energy burning in his mind and used it as fuel to help him act on what he could control – his disobedient transport. Not his mind. His transport. His focus, his plan, was to punish his transport for not working properly. It was transport. It had to do what he said, and when it didn't, he had to make it.

He got so worked up and angry; he was pacing back and forth for an entire hour literally tearing out his hair trying to decide how he could handle his transport and then a nasty little idea popped into his head. There were all sorts of transplants nowadays, and Sherlock knew how to perform most of them, and he got it into his head that he could easily remove the nerves, the tendons, the bones, everything inside his left wrist that was causing the problem.

So he tried to.

But it was so awkward, and so hard, and he couldn't cut the vein vertically because then he would bleed out in approximately 15 seconds, which would make it very difficult to perform a successful transplant. So he tried horizontally, which REALLY didn't work, and then there was blood everywhere and he then realized that he didn't have any nerves or tendons or bones to replace his faulty ones unless he used the ones in his right hand, and he tried to get at those but that didn't work either – and then he realized, after he had really and truly failed and acknowledged that he could not perform a transplant, the most important thing of all.

Now that he had failed, John couldn't find him alive.

There was blood everywhere and Sherlock had broken several things downstairs and a few more upstairs here in the bedroom and he had used JOHN'S razor, not his own, and oh, God, how could he have been so stupid? He had failed his last desperate attempt to fix himself and now he had to die, to leave, so that after John sent the violin into the repair shop and threw out the sheets and bought a new razor, he wasn't left with a Sherlock who needed fixing, too.

Sherlock didn't care about the dying lark so much as how badly he had failed at this suicide thing. If he had really wanted to slit his wrists, he could have done it so much more efficiently. It would all have been over in fifteen seconds or less and now the bedroom was a disaster and he was a disaster and God, what a sick fuck he was not to kill himself properly earlier in the day when he first picked up the razor. Preferably with much less of a mess.

But now he was stuck in this, and he realized that he had pretty much wrecked John's facial razor, so Sherlock went downstairs and dug the X-Acto knife out of a kitchen drawer that normally held the cheese grater. John had attempted to hide it again, but Sherlock always found things that John hid. He examined the blade, making sure he hadn't damaged it on those kidney stones a few weeks ago, and then went back upstairs, taking care to wipe the blood off the counter before he left.

He calculated he had about two hours left before he bled out through his wrists, and he wondered what he was going to do with all that time. And that was when another nasty little idea popped into his head, because after all, you never, ever got to experiment on a living human nowadays. It was unethical. Unless that living human was doomed, and that living human was yourself, and that living human had already died inside anyway…

It was remarkable, the results of the experiments. It was so different working with an actual body that still had life left in it. He examined the layers of the fingertip first, but he hadn't thought that it would bleed quite that much, so he found a lighter in the nightstand and used it to cauterize the wound. And then he looked at the structure of the ankle, which was absolutely fascinating, and something he would rather have liked to approach further if he hadn't only an hour and a half left to live.

Well, he had only an hour before John came home now. He would have to hurry this up.

Then he realized something that made him cry for the first time that afternoon. He had not cried when he couldn't play, and he hadn't cried when he had started cutting, and he hadn't cried when he switched to the X-Acto. No, only now was he crying.

John had dashed out the door that morning and yelled that he loved Sherlock and Sherlock had not told him that he loved him back.

Now he couldn't.

Sherlock knew just how mad this was. He was killing himself, had sliced himself open in several places all over a violin, for Christ's sake, and now he was crying because he hadn't told his husband he loved him. It was absolutely ridiculous. Sherlock was ridiculous. Another reason to just get rid of himself.

Sherlock wasn't going to carve something like that into his body. That was going too far. And he wasn't about to write it down, because he was starting to feel a bit dizzy and he didn't think he would be able to get up and find a pen and paper.

Then the nastiest idea of the lot popped into his head. It was really quite twisted and horrible. But he was dying. When you are dying, anything goes.

John loved paintings by Renaissance people, mostly. Vermeer and things like that. But Sherlock remembered that he had really, truly loved Van Gogh. They had been at a museum for a case and they had gone into a gallery full of Van Gogh and John had looked so excited and happy that Sherlock had immediately saved it to his hard drive in the folder labeled **Things that will never, under any circumstances, be deleted**. John would understand the reference, in any case.

And before Sherlock had time to change his mind, before what tiny bit of reasoning was left had the chance to persuade him to stop, he had grabbed the X-Acto knife and sliced off a good portion of his left ear.

It was only an ear, Sherlock reflected. But he felt ridiculously lighter now that it was gone. Something told him as he held that bit of ear in his hand that he was sadistic, insane, that his hard drive had been corrupted with a virus, and then a revelation hit him and he threw back his head and laughed.

He knew the virus well.

Emotion. Sentiment.

It was what had led him to pick up the violin. It was what had led him to slash his wrists and attempt an impossible transplant when he couldn't play. And it was what had led him to just cut off his ear, which had been one of the dullest and most clichéd things he had ever done, now that he thought of it. He should have carved his love for John into his chest, his stomach, his legs. He obviously hadn't loved him enough.

Hadn't loved him enough.

What a paltry emotion, love. So insignificant against something this powerful. To think that he could have fought depression, anger, all of that, with something as weak as love. How silly of him.

Some people would ask how this could be. How a man, who had loved another man so much, with all the heart he had left, could lose all that in a matter of minutes, one slip of a razor blade, and errant thought processes. How he could revert back to the machine in under ten seconds, with no regrets whatsoever.

Sherlock Holmes was dying. He had gone insane. He couldn't think because he had lost too much blood. To him, that stupid mistake had signified the dangers, the idiocies of passion and romantic attachments. By cutting off his ear, he had finally discovered how to keep his feelings from dominating over his reasoning. And his newly restored reason, properly active again for the first time in months, told him that love wasn't worth it.

He had removed it. All of it. Human shortcomings and feelings, love and anger, everything was gone and look at him now, he was triumphant and if he could do this to everyone he would become God.

It was to be his last discovery, and what a fitting one, too. He felt a bit dreamy. It was getting difficult to concentrate, to think properly. The sheets were very shiny. He hadn't thought they shone so brightly when he bought them, but now they were positively glistening. How posh. Perhaps 300-thread count was good for something after all. He'd have to pass it onto John.

John! The experiment!

John would so love to know the results of Sherlock's experiment. Perhaps then Sherlock would be remembered as a revolutionary instead of a failure. Reason told him this wasn't likely. Still, even though he had been wrong to love John, to let anyone get that close, he concluded that John was just as clever as he had been at the beginning of the day and that John would be interested in something so avant-garde. With the last bit of strength he had, he wrote down the result in the only place he knew John would find it (in as precise a manner as possible, so as to leave no room for misinterpretation).

Then he saw the time out of the corner of his eye and without having any time to reflect on anything, to change his mind, he tightened his grip on the X-Acto knife and made the final cut.

One hundred and twenty long seconds passed. What came after twenty? Was it twenty three? Sherlock was missing something in between, he knew it. But he was just so dizzy now. And his chest hurt a little bit. It was hard to keep his arm from slipping off the edge of the bed. Or keep his eyes open.

The razor clattered down onto the floor as the hand's grip slackened and the arm fell off the bed.

And then the only sound in the room for the next eight minutes was the steady drip, drip, drip of red liquid pearls rolling off the pale index finger onto the floor.

_In case you are wondering - the pieces Sherlock was playing were the third and fourth movements of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, the Passacaglia and the Burlesque, respectively. They're pretty cool pieces and extremely difficult technically. _


End file.
